Facebook's parent company, Meta Platforms, announced on Monday that it has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. state of California against malicious attackers who ran more than 39,000 phishing websites impersonating its digital properties to trick consumers into disclosing their username and password.
“Today, we filed a federal lawsuit in California court to disrupt phishing attacks designed to deceive people into sharing their login credentials on fake login pages for Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Phishing is a significant threat to millions of Internet users”, states the report.
The social engineering strategy entailed the construction of rogue websites that tried to portray as Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp login pages, prompting victims to input their login details, which were subsequently captured by the defendants. The unidentified actors are also being sought for $500,000 by the tech behemoth.
The assaults were conducted with the help of Ngrok, a relay service that diverted internet traffic to malicious websites while concealing the exact location of the fraudulent equipment. Meta stated that the frequency of these phishing assaults has increased since March 2021 and that it has collaborated with the relay service to restrict thousands of URLs to phishing sites.
The lawsuit comes just days after Facebook revealed it was making efforts to disrupt the activities of seven surveillance-for-hire firms that generated over 1,500 phony identities on Facebook and Instagram to target 50,000 users in over 100 countries. Meta announced last month that it has barred four harmful cyber groups from attacking journalists, humanitarian organizations, and anti-regime military forces in Afghanistan and Syria.
“This lawsuit is one more step in our ongoing efforts to protect people’s safety and privacy, send a clear message to those trying to abuse our platform, and increase accountability of those who abuse technology. We will also continue to collaborate with online hosting and service providers to identify and disrupt phishing attacks as they occur. We proactively block and report instances of abuse to the hosting and security community, domain name registrars, privacy/proxy services, and others. And Meta blocks and shares phishing URLs so other platforms can also block them”, mentioned the report.
